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The cost of health insurance is rising across the board, even among people who get their coverage through an employer, new data shows.

Workers in states like Pennsylvania are spending a higher percentage of their paychecks for employer-sponsored health insurance than in previous years, according to a new report published Wednesday by The Commonwealth Fund.

A Pennsylvania resident with single-person coverage paid on average more than $4,000 total in premium contributions and annual deductible costs in 2024, the data shows, which represented about 9.5% of the state’s annual median household income.

“If you just think about it, one out of every $10 that you have in your pocket today could potentially be going to health care over the course of the year,” said David Radley, senior scientist at The Commonwealth Fund’s Tracking Health System Performance initiative.

Those costs were up 27% from the prior year and an increase from where costs were several years ago in 2020, according to the report.

For families, the amount they paid in premiums and deductibles for their employer-sponsored health insurance plans was even greater, reaching more than $10,000 a year.

“At that level, for some families, [it] forces them to make tough decisions,” Radley said. “Even if they have health insurance coverage, they may be thinking twice, ‘Should I really go to the doctor if I’m not feeling well? Should I get this particular test? You know, should I fill this prescription?’”

Experts say rising insurance costs for businesses and their employees is a consequence of growing health care spending trends nationally, which involve how often people use services and how much they pay for them.

All of that, Radley said, can be driven by hospital consolidation that increases prices for medical services, ongoing health care labor shortages, inflation in the cost of supplies, high utilization of pricey medications like GLP-1 drugs and more.

“Ultimately, I think you have to tackle both price and utilization if we want to sort of rein in overall spending,” he said. “And that’s really hard to do, because we don’t want to be in a position where we limit access to things that are really beneficial for people. We don’t want to have to ration care in that way. That’s not what our system is about.”